Page 323 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 12 305

In my analysis, Drummer was the first gay magazine to drop gay “youth”
and “prettiness”—and Queen’s Quarterly attitude—and head toward the
fresh “de-forming” queer edge where “leather” breaks the forms of “gay
being” and “gay thinking” with its progressive ritual, discipline, and meta-
phor. This “de-forming” leatherphobia has long caused the queenstream
to disrespect and fear the cultural sensitivities of the leatherstream. That’s
my sixty-year impression from reading, editing, and writing for gay media
where the rather paranoid agenda of trashing masculinity is as shamefully
common as gay media’s page after page of screaming heterophobia.
Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto and her gunshots, fired into the
leather-friendly Warhol and the leatherman Amaya, caused me in my jour-
nal notes to draft the kind of “Masculinist Manifesto” inherent in my every
issue of Drummer 19-33 and in my contributions post-Embry. It also figured
in the fictive subplot of gay civil wars over gender fascism among all genders
as dramatized in Some Dance to Remember.
Truly, it is disrespectful to see Lou Thomas’s homomasculine Target
Studio photos reprinted anonymously and labeled “From the Drummer
Archives” as if those four words canceled his ownership of his own intellec-
tual property by some overriding gay eminent domain. What that means is
the editors and publisher in the End Days of 1990s Drummer failed profes-
sionally in their responsibility to assign credit and copyright, and to return
materials. Their appropriations certainly exceeded “fair use.”
At our 1730 Divisadero Street office, the Drummer closets upstairs in
that old Victorian where I worked were jammed floor to ceiling with art
work and photos. When I asked Embry about hiring someone part-time to
mail back the original goods to contributors, he used a couple phrases like
“no return postage” and “no return addresses.”
Where did all that treasure trove go with Embry’s move to Harriet
Street, and every move of office thereafter?
Ending up with mice and Davolt?
And then sold privately, secretly, to Embry?

EMBRY’S GRUDGE AGAINST DEBLASE AND DEBLASE’S
LEATHER ARCHIVES & MUSEUM

In the 1990s, Embry often scorned the Leather Archives & Museum
because he hated any competition in collecting the art objects and ephem-
era of leather history for which he figured he had first dibs by right of his
one-time ownership of Drummer. He was always jealous of the older, wiser
entrepreneur Chuck Renslow who, with his pioneer magazines, bars, and

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